Kitchen Queries

Welcome to Kitchen Queries, where the nigella.com team will answer your cooking or food related questions. We’d love you to submit some of your recipe problems, dilemmas or queries for us to get our teeth into!

Please note, we are only able to answer questions selected for publication and aren't able to enter into personal correspondence.

Latest Queries

Christmas Chocolate Cookies

I would like to make cookies for Christmas using Nigella's Christmas Chocolate Biscuits recipe. Can I drizzle a little melted butter on the cookies about 5 minutes before they finish baking to add a little more buttery taste to them? Thank you, Alysson.

How do I adapt the Chocolate Mint Cookies recipe to make 200 cookies? These are for a work Christmas party. Thank you.

Posted by alysson. Answered on 10th Dec 2013 at 12.00

From the nigella team:

Nigella's Christmas Chocolate Cookies (from Christmas and on the Nigella website) are fat shortbread-type cookies that are decorated with a chocolate icing and festive sprinkles. The cookies have a slightly crumbly texture which give a melt-in-the-mouth quality.

We would not recommend drizzling butter on the cookies as this will either affect the finished texture of the cookies or leave them with a greasy surface which could cause problems when you decorate them. If you are looking for a very buttery flavour to your cookies then we suggest that you consider a butter cookie recipe instead of a chocolate cookie. Nigella has a butter cut-out cookie recipe in Feast whicg gives nice cookies to decorate, or Nigella's Vanilla Shortbread recipe (from Forever Summer and on the Nigella website) gives a buttery, crumbly cookie.

Nigella's Chocolate Mint Cookie recipe (from Nigella Express and on the Nigella website) makes approximately 26 cookies. It is fairly easy to make multiple batches of cookies as the shaping and baking of the cookies is the same, but you should remember that most domestic equipment cannot cope with extra-large volumes of ingredients. We suggest that you make the cookies in batches, making a double quantity of dough for each batch and forming the cookies in tablespoons on baking sheets (for 200 cooies you would need to make 4 batches in this way). We would emphasise, however, that we are assuming that you have a large free-standing mixer, for a hand-held mixer stick to single quantities of the recipe. Don't over-crowd the cookies on the baking sheets when baking as they will spread slightly and could merge into each other if too close together.